Maliki?s retort
EVEN IF Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki received encouragement from the Bush administration to excoriate Democratic senators Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin for saying he should be replaced, his complaint against American politicians' "ugly interference" in Iraqi affairs was not entirely unjustified. Most of the American meddling, however, has originated with President Bush and his advisers.
From the beginning, US policy makers have been ambivalent about independence for post-invasion Iraqi governments. The administration has lauded those governments as independent, sovereign models for the new democratic order Bush wants to confer on the larger Middle East while criticizing those governments for failing to achieve objectives that were formulated in Washington.
Maliki may sense a move by US politicians to blame him for failing to create the conditions of political reconciliation that would make it possible to start withdrawing US military forces. Indeed, there are signs that conservatives would like to scapegoat Maliki's government for the uncontrollable chaos loosed in Iraq as a result of Bush's mistakes. For their part, some Democrats are suggesting that US troops have no obligation to go on fighting for a government that is not doing its part to create a stable Iraq.
In fact, Maliki was never suited to be the unifying force that the Bush administration wanted him to be. His is a predominantly Shi'ite government presided over by a prime minister from the religious Dawa Party who gained his position because of support from the anti-American leader of the Mahdi army militia, Moqtada Sadr. As demonstrated when Maliki praised Iran's "positive and constructive role" in Iraq during a recent visit to Tehran, he shares with other leaders of Shi'ite religious parties an expectation that Iraq -- or that part of it ruled by Shi'ites -- will eventually belong to an Iranian orbit of influence.
A most inconvenient truth is that Maliki's government owes its existence to Bush's post-invasion policies. Bush missed a chance in the spring of 2003 to sponsor a conference of Iraqi political groups like the so-called "loya jirga" that led to the creation of the Hamid Karzai government in Afghanistan. Had there been a swift transfer of authority to an Iraqi government, one in which Sunni Arabs were properly represented, much of the tragic sectarian violence of the past four years might have been avoided.
Bush's policies, with their obtuse indifference to Iraqi realities, led to the current reliance on Maliki's ineffective sectarian government. But American politicians who call for replacing Maliki ought to recognize not only that they sound like colonialists to Iraqi ears, but also that more malevolent forces are sharpening their knives in Iraq, preparing to wage a struggle for power not at the ballot box but in the streets. 